iPod Surgery for Fun and profit
Posted by Patrick on Friday, July 28, 2006
My buddy has a silver iPod Mini, which his girlfriend purchased for him. He had been using at the gym. One day as he's in the parking lot of said gym (and for whatever reason was holding the device by the headphone cord), it unplugged itself and dropped, and smacked, into the pavement with a no-doubt painful thud.
Now, they don't make the Mini model anymore, but when they did, they were putting little tiny hard drives inside of them. These little hard drives hold all the music, and (despite their small size) are real life hard drives with little motors and a spinning magnetic disk. At least that's what I've been told. The iPod could be transcribing the music into binary onto magical beans, and I'd believe it.
Anyway. The device turns on, but it doesn't work right. Songs skip themselves or don't play through all the way, and copying music onto it doesn't work right either. So, on a whim, I snag the pod from his clutches and bring it back to Rockland-Ave for repairs.
I tried all the software related resets and restores, but to no avail. I could copy a few songs on, and then the evil corruption error messages would appear. I even tried installing the Linux operating system on it, but that didn't help either. I knew that the hard drive had crapped out. Gravity, it appears, is still in control. Replacing the 4 gigabyte hard drive with another drive of equal value would have been pretty expensive (couple hundred bucks, at least), so I turned to the internets for advice.
As it turns out, the Mini used a drive with the same connector as a standard Compact Flash card. This is the same kind of card that many digital cameras use to store photos. It made me wonder, could a (relatively) cheap Compact Flash card work in my buddy's Mini? Could I save the day?
The answer (after some intense reading) was yes! All I had to do was be crazy enough to open up the device.
The whole procedure took just about an hour. Itty-bitty screwdrivers and tweezers were helpful. It was pretty stressful though, and there's no free space inside the iPod to work - you have to slide out all its guts and pull pieces off to get at the drive.
I removed the busted 4 gig drive (pictured above) to put in a 1 gigabyte SanDisk compact flash card. The replacement drive was a little thinner than the stock drive, but the connectors matched up.... pretty encouraging.
I squished everything back in it's case, and turned it on. And waited. And nothing happened! Bah! I thought. Then I plugged it into the computer and ran the restore utility. After a short wait, it connected and the iPod recognized the flash card as a drive, and soon I was charging it and copying songs on! I was pretty excited... it actually worked!
Here's the proof photo. (For the skeptical: No iPod Mini was ever sold with just a 1 gigabyte drive):
I've been testing it for a few days now at work, and it's run like a champ (an iChamp? huh?). So for 40 bucks, you too can repair your friends iPod Mini's. This wouldn't work on a Nano, or any of the full sized iPods as they use different drives. This also probably wouldn't work well on the Mini's produced by BMW.
Also, 1 gigabyte is not a lot of music, certainly not enough for a full day at the office, but certainly would be fine for a workout. Plus the Compact Flash card probably doesn't use as much battery life (no moving parts, unlike the 4 gig stock drive), so that's cool. It certainly lasts longer than the 2-3 hours I average in my 10gig iPod from 2 years ago. 
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